Why I Started Building Maya Tools
The story behind my Maya Python toolkit — frustration, automation, and a better workflow for animators.
The Problem
Every animator who has worked in production knows the pain: repetitive tasks that eat up hours of your day. Exporting FBX files one at a time. Rebuilding rigs from scratch. Digging through menus to find the same tool you used yesterday.
I got tired of it. So I started scripting.
The First Script
The first tool I wrote was a simple batch FBX exporter. Five lines of MEL that saved me about two hours every week on a broadcast job. That was the moment I realised how much headroom there was for automation in animation pipelines.
Growing the Toolkit
Over the next year, the toolkit grew. I added a rig assistant, a constraint baker, a reference manager. Each tool solved a specific problem I was experiencing in production.
The entire toolkit is now open source on GitHub. I believe in sharing tools with the community — the animation industry runs on shared knowledge.
What’s Next
I’m currently working on a constraint visualiser and an animation layer manager. Watch this space.